


Senses

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Implied Sexual Content, Loss and finding again, M/M, Spoilers for S3, Touching, five senses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 06:19:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11961504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: Keith comes to know Shiro through each of his senses - hearing, taste, touch, smell, and sight. Each offers him a different view, new information learned, another door into everything they are opened.





	Senses

**Author's Note:**

> I've been struggling a bit lately on the writing front, so I decided to delve into this piece, the first of the five. As touched upon in the summary, I want to work this small series using the five senses we come to know our world through and use it to define, in part, the small bits of Keith and Shiro's relationship. This one does have some S3 spoilers in the last section, so consider yourself forewarned, and again, it's a bit experimental, but I hope you all enjoy it.

Words have energy.

They are part of the cosmic dust that filters through souls and galaxies alike. This much Keith has learned over the years. 

But just as he knows this, he also knows that not all of them are weighted with meaning. Some sit as hollow as skulls forgotten beneath desert suns. They exist, true enough, but stripped down and emptied out, perhaps a whisper of what had once been but no longer is or will be. 

_What does it mean when the devil’s own don’t want him anymore?_

Others are the spiders that make such abandoned places home, spinning and weaving in the dark of mind-space, filling it with their filigree work and the corpses of beautiful things. They’re dusted out easily enough, however. Enraged but of no further harm, they eventually scatter over the sands, seeking new abodes to toil within. 

_Piss, vinegar, and talent. One of the three is apparently all it takes to negate the rest._

Still others are like scorpions, taking respite in the shadows cast beneath bone only to sting when startled or provoked. Tails lash out at ghosts and curious hands alike, caring little for the pain inflicted only that their perimeter is secured. Their life bought for another few hours, a couple of sunsets more. Keith has long since outgrown the potency of their venom.

Most of it, anyway. After all, there are very few stings that can rob a man of his breath and make him think Death is lingering just around the next thought.

 _Pilot error_ had been one of them though. Brought him right to his knees with the beats of his heart cascading down quick as rockfall. Like he couldn’t bleed out fast enough over those words.

But he survived that.

So too, apparently, had Shiro.

***

Words have promise.

They glow warm as bonfires on summer beaches, defiant against the crash of waves. Around them, hearts jump to celebrate, dancing to the flicker of flame and the heat left in the air by a dying sun. Sweating out dreams, laughing out desires, and with one careful thought, they unhook and dismiss the armor wrapped around them, leaving iron to rust in the sand.

When Shiro whispers, Keith hears the pulse of a thousand different galaxies. It’s the quiet tinkling of celestial chimes as wishes are made and lives pursued with moments of reckless abandon, the greatest fuck all ever given to the universe. It comes in breathless words half-clipped by moans and laughter until it becomes nothing but a roar in his head as fire devours fire and sets his whole body alight. Those are the moments Keith thinks he reaches out, dips his hand into the eternal cosmic stream and feels that thin thread of starlight wrapping itself around his soul’s finger, declaring him home and hope alike. 

_You’re the thing I fall asleep to._

_What does that mean exactly?_

_. . .It means I don’t want to live without you, Keith._

Keith whispers, and he hears life renewing itself. This trickling fountain of endless want, pulsing warm and bright as it streams over his lips and into Shiro’s ear, his mouth. Words he pulls together from the place where his heart meets his mind and honesty bares them both clean.

He finds himself coiled beneath the heat of shared blankets, listening to the breath fill Shiro’s lungs, listening to the laugh that expels it out seconds later. When fingers rustle through his hair and tickle at the nape of his neck, laughter finds root in his tongue next, and Keith wonders if sound isn’t like the white-tufted frills of dandelion seeds, sent out into the world by a hope or a dream, and planting itself somewhere fertile and new. 

And there. . .there sound lives and breathes again, blossoming beautifully as it spills color across memories. 

_You’ll never be without me, Shiro._

***

Words can be broken just as easily as they can do the breaking. They can shatter when they drop from lips, drawing blood from bloodless wounds as they cut into the bodies of souls. Slivers of them sometimes slip into veins, and when that odd pain digs into the heart, sharp and piercing, you want to place your hand over your chest and begin to wonder why it is your fingers can’t figure out the source from touch alone. It’s because those jagged remnants are trying to pass from chamber to chamber, and they cannot be plucked out like shrapnel but must be endured.

And endured.

And endured.

Very little makes it through the heart without being felt. 

Keith knows this, and sometimes the world forces him to acknowledge that very simple fact. 

_Pilot log. I am one day out from Thayserix._

Hope clings to those syllables, spoken in a voice Keith had dreamed about for months on end. It had woken him from sleep more nights than not, startling in how near it sounded only for silence to greet him in the dark of his room. Quiet had sat there in the shadows, heavy and black, consuming the sparks of steadfast belief. Grinding them down to ash until all that existed was the sound of his own breathing, growing ragged as reality cut down what would have been joy, and the sheets fisted in his hands. 

Keith remembers those nights, and they are a pale comparison to the voice flickering to life with precise spikes over the screen opened before him. Silence is a thick purple line that demarcates the ground level nothing from the somethings of sound. A small breath is a bump, no more than an ant’s hill, hiding the depths of an existence still fighting well beneath the surface. But when Shiro speaks, silence is obliterated by his voice, mountains crashing up and out of the earth of that thick line, piercing the sky with summits just waiting to be breached. He watches as every syllable punctures through the emptiness, marking undeniable proof that Shiro lived.

That he fought. 

_SOS ping is active. No signs of anyone._

That he still fights. 

Words are made of tears. Emotion sits, crystal clear and salted with just a touch of human desperation, within them. The tremors that wrack a voice as it defines each syllable, shameless and needing, run right through you. Their seismic activity brings hearts to their knees. But the words themselves slip over skin, quickly cooling and leaving behind the profound sense of having touched something heaven-bound.

Herein lies something good and honest. Herein lies the truth of a soul, harsh and painful as it is. 

Keith wants to turn his gaze from the screen but he can’t. Because there are things he has tried to run from but Shiro has never been one of them. He’s his own personal lodestone, pulling and pulling until Keith knows he has to answer that call. 

And he has called out, for months and months and months. 

In that time, he learned that silence is chilling, that you can drown in it easily as if thrown into Arctic waters. He learned that the cold always kills you first. 

_I am seven days out. Oxygen levels are low. And fuel is. . .gone. This will be my last entry._

Words mark last moments. 

Static rushes in over the recording. Silence flatlines across the screen once more. Keith hears his heart stumble, its faltering echoing out across his chest cavity.

“You were ready to die.”

Behind him, a step is taken, the tread heavy and known. The echoes keep ringing, bouncing off the thoughts in his head and the breath trying to make its way down into his lungs.

“I’ve stared down my own death enough times to have made that peace with the idea.”

Something rips through Keith then, this awful tearing that leaves him feeling raw and open. Exposed right to the core. He wonders if thoughts don’t drip out with the same trickling sound as water coursing over mountain rocks does. 

Drip, drip, drip. 

Or maybe it’s at the same rate as blood gathering itself over a fingertip before dropping to the earth below. Words and ideas coalescing into something bright and stained with life and then letting go of its confines to shatter over tongue and scatter into the air between them. 

Them. Him and Shiro. 

“You don’t make peace with that idea! You fight it! Every goddamned day you fight it!” 

The words explode, bright and electric, lighting up the world. Keith sees the way they would have spiked over the screen, as cutting as newly forged blades and just as thin as they stabbed into space. He feels them as sharply as he feels the tears burning up his lashes. 

_You are my end. I don’t think I’ve wanted anything more than knowing that, Keith._

His heart drops into the pit of his chest. When it had climbed into his throat and stood there beating frantically, Keith doesn’t know. But he feels it plummet and hears the splash as his emotions consume it once more. He’s drowning. . . .drowning. . .and the sound of it bubbles in his ears, and the pain clatters in his head, and his lungs scream and scream and scream for breath.

He takes it as a gasp.

Hands settle to his cheeks, palms warm as they press lightly against them, and with a low exhale streaming over lips, the shape of which Keith had memorized years ago, the sound drains from his world. 

He breathes out quietly.

It's been said that words bring life.

“I am your end, Shiro. Not Death. Not Voltron. Me.” The words tremble over his lips, soft but not subdued. A fighting force all their own. “You don’t get to deny me that anymore.”


End file.
